This passage from the article: > Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it. Scientists sometimes

This passage from the article: > Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it. Scientists sometimes compare covert attention to a spotlight. (The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.) Your cortex can shift covert attention from the text in front of you to a nearby person, to the sounds in your backyard, to a thought or a memory. Covert attention is the virtual movement of deep processing from one item to another. very much put me in mind of an unusual book: A Life of One's Own (Marion Milner, 1934) - in particular, this: At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought faint patternings which can be brought to distinction when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is. But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can widen or narrow it as I choose.[1] 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77